Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Antarctica's Summer Resort

AS we prepare to go ashore on South Georgia Island, a remote sliver of British territory 1,200 miles east of Cape Horn in the far southern Atlantic Ocean, it feels more like war than a holiday. Before the operation begins, we are summoned to a briefing in our ship's dining room. No one who misses it will be allowed into the Zodiacs.

Andrew, a 28-year old Canadian who doesn't need a uniform to establish his authority, tells us in no uncertain terms what we must do and what we must not. We are to descend the gangplank of the 370-foot Akademik Ioffe, a chartered Russian polar research vessel, one by one. We are stuffed into sweaters, waterproof slickers and boots, and are creamed and goggled against ultra-violet rays of the January sun, in southern summer. Andrew reminds us that the damaged ozone layer offers diminished screening from these burning rays in the far south.

At the bottom of the gangplank, we await instructions from a crewman stationed there. Another crewman waits in a tiny bouncing rubber raft -- a Zodiac -- to brace our steps. The instant the ocean swell lifts the little craft up to the lowest step of the gangplank, we are to put one foot on the raft's rubber gunwale and step onto the flat bottom. Then we are to hunker down on the gunwale, and hope that not too much spray breaks over us during the run to shore.

Zodiacs, oblong doughnuts of tough rubber tubing with an outboard motor, were designed by the oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Used nowadays worldwide for remote landing, they are fast, safe and maneuverable. But they don't keep you dry.

When our Zodiac hits the beach, the front passenger is to pivot around as quickly as possible and step off into the surf. The nine other passengers are to slide forward and follow in turn. An advance party of crew members steadies us as we head onto the beach, surf swirling around our shins.

Once at the land's edge, we must group up before advancing. Southern fur seals are barking and baring their teeth not far up the beach. We are to get no closer to them than 15 feet. This is partly for their protection, partly for ours. The young male seals bounce at us, as snappish as terrier pups, while the calving females lie languorously on the black pebbles and the dominant male strikes heroic poses, his nose in the air.

A little farther along, a scrum of southern elephant seals lies piled on the beach. They lift their huge heads to look at us, mouths agape, uttering borborygmi that could come from either end. A line of king penguins marches up stiffly to examine us, looking, as the polar explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote in 1922, like self-important but portly gentlemen late for dinner.

We are stepping into a scene of utter biological prodigality. It is January and the myriad mammals and birds that inhabit the far southern Atlantic have only a few short months and a few stretches of ice-free beach to reproduce. Soon, snow and ice will send them back to sea for the rest of the year. They are making the most of their summer moment. All around us on these stony beaches at the edge of the ice they fight for territory, breeding, killing prey, feeding young, or becoming prey in their turn.

King penguins pack the available meadowland back of the beach. Their chicks, far more unkempt than their sleek black and white parents, fill shaggy brown coats to bursting. They stand packed into nurseries. Each adult can somehow distinguish its own hungry chick's call among the chorus of plaintive begging.

Though the three-feet-tall adult king penguins have no enemies on land, their eggs and chicks are vulnerable. Skuas, brown gull-like birds of prey, patrol overhead, and sheathbills, recalling white New York park pigeons except for beaks as murderous as pruning shears, prowl the colony watching for a parent to commit the slightest lapse. We watch one parent penguin turn its egg carelessly, letting it slip out from under its stomach feathers. A sheathbill rushes up, punctures the egg and gobbles its contents. When the bereft parent wanders off into the colony, its neighbors peck at it for intruding on their territory. They continue their own lives obliviously, crowing or bowing to their mates or fighting neighbors, tracing their little circle's border by the reach of their beaks. The sounds, smells and bustle of hundreds of thousands of these creatures overwhelm our effort to take it all in.

The smaller penguins -- gentoos and macaronis -- nest on hills farther back. The adults are constantly going and coming across the beach. Some are arriving from fishing expeditions at sea, porpoising up to the beach and jumping out. Once ashore, they stump inland purposefully, pigeon-toed, flippers outstretched for balance. They are capable of climbing a mile or two across stony scree and ice up to their hillside colony, to bring their chicks a meal of half-digested squid or krill, or to relieve their mate on the egg.

They pass their fellows on their way to sea. Outgoing penguins jostle each other like teen-age boys at the water's edge before the first one dares to jump in. They know well that it is in the sea that danger lies: leopard seals and killer whales. Once underwater, they ''fly'' with their wings and paddle with their enormous feet, transformed into submarine projectiles.

The most dramatic creatures on South Georgia are surely the albatrosses. The giant white wandering albatrosses nest at the top of steep islets covered with tussock grass, along a stretch of the northeastern coast of South Georgia called the Bay of Isles. With a wingspread over 11 feet, they are the largest flying birds. Having watched them sail motionless over open ocean for hours on end behind our ship, watching us watching them, we already understand why sailors were superstitious about them.

In January, wandering albatrosses occupy the two-foot-high hummocks of vegetation they have built to hold a single egg. When we land and climb up their islet, they sit on their mounds and stare at us. Infinitely graceful light-mantled sooty albatrosses maneuver their eight-foot pearl-gray wings along cliff faces where their single chicks are tucked into grass-grown ledges. Innocent of enemies, these birds make us feel we have arrived minutes after the Creation.

South Georgia, at 1,450 square miles a little bigger than Rhode Island, has more vestiges of human history than we expected. A dozen abandoned whaling factories lie rusting at the head of fjords. As our ship enters Cumberland Bay, midway up the eastern coast, we see the remains of the Norwegian whaling station of Grytviken as a reddish smudge along the green shore, under looming black peaks and blue-green glaciers. As we approach, we can make out corrugated-iron sheds, steel tanks and sunken whaling vessels, some with a harpoon gun still in place.

Grytviken, active from 1904 to 1964, is the most accessible to tourists of the South Georgian whaling factories. A few people even live there year-round. A British couple, Tim and Pauline Carr, came from England on an antique 28-foot sailboat seven years ago and never left. They live on the boat.

During the Antarctic summer, when several tour ships may arrive in a week, they run an excellent small museum devoted to whaling and Antarctic exploration in what was once the white frame residence of the factory director. The rest of the year, they sail and ski in temperatures that the sea maintains not far below freezing. Their only company is a dozen British soldiers stationed on a point about a mile east of Grytviken since the Falklands War.

Since South Georgia gets so few tourists, there are no facilities. Except for the white wooden gothic church, built in 1913 and now under repair by Ken Back, another Englishman who spends his winters (the southern summer) at Grytviken, the buildings -- vast sheds and vats of the whaling factory -- are rusting away. Grytviken is a double ghost town. The men are gone, and the whales are gone. After it became possible in the late 19th century to kill the great whales with explosive harpoons, the world's whalers killed a million and a half of them.

Ninety years ago, the whalers of Grytviken didn't even have to leave Cumberland Bay to catch their fill of great whales. We found some only once in four days in the waters around South Georgia: a couple of humpback whales that spouted and lolled on the surface and pushed their snouts into the air for a look at us.

Before we leave Grytviken, we stop at the cemetery for the ritual toast to Sir Ernest Shackleton. His stone monument is surrounded by the simpler crosses of Norwegian whaling men, sailors from several countries, and a single Argentine soldier from the Falklands War. The legendary Antarctic explorer died in Grytviken in 1922 while preparing another attempt to cross the south polar ice cap.

Shackleton is most famous for rescuing his entire crew after an ill-fated expedition to cross Antarctica in 1915-16. After their ship Endurance was caught and crushed in the ice, Shackleton was eventually able to sail one of the ship's 20-foot lifeboats across 800 miles of open ocean to South Georgia in a hair-raising miracle of navigation and physical and emotional endurance. He arrived on the wrong side of the island, how ever, and had to cross the glaciers of interior South Georgia on foot before he could find help at the whaling station of Stromness (a few miles from Grytviken).

Our cruise continued southward to the starker Antarctic Peninsula, all ice and rock. South Georgia is the ideal stepping stone to the harsher Antarctic: a land in-between, ice at its core, green around the edges in summer, and the scene of intense human and animal striving

If you go

Marine Expeditions, 30 Hazelton Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5R 2E2, (416) 964-9069, fax (416) 964-2366, plans about 20 trips to the Antarctic from November to March, including three that stop at South Georgia Island. These 24-day trips (also stopping in the Falklands) start Nov. 20 and 22 and Jan. 17, and cost $5,495 to $8,495, including air fare from New York, Miami, Toronto and, for $165 extra, Los Angeles.

We sailed on the 370-foot Akademik Ioffe (the Marine Adventurer in brochures), a utilitarian but comfortable vessel built in Finland in 1989 for the Soviet Academy of Sciences for deep-sea acoustical research. She has a stabilizing system and her bridge is packed with up-to-date navigational equipment. She is strengthened against pack ice, and can turn on her own axis.

Cabins are Spartan but quite comfortable, with private baths. Common spaces include a pleasant dining room, a small library and a sauna. The most popular spot was the bridge, to which we had access at all hours. Food was excellent, fresh fish and Argentine wines being the most prized items.

The crew was efficient and pleasant, but said little about the ironies of its shift from science (and perhaps intelligence-gathering) to tourism. The housekeeping and landing were capably managed by Marine Expeditions.